[6] In 2012, Rushkoff was declared the sixth most influential thinker in the world by MIT Technology Review, following Steven Pinker, David Graeber, Nobel Prize-winner Daniel Kahneman, Thilo Sarrazin, and Richard Florida.

[13] Rushkoff emerged in the early 1990s as an active member of the cyberpunk movement, developing friendships and collaborations with people including Timothy Leary, RU Sirius, Paul Krassner, Robert Anton Wilson, Ralph Abraham, Terence McKenna, Genesis P-Orridge, Ralph Metzner, Grant Morrison, Mark Pesce, Erik Davis, and other writers, artists and philosophers interested in the intersection of technology, society and culture.

As his books became more accepted, and his concepts of the "media virus"[18] and "social contagion" became mainstream ideas, Rushkoff was invited to deliver commentaries on National Public Radio's All Things Considered,[19] and to make documentaries for the PBS series Frontline.

Simultaneously, Rushkoff continued to develop his relationship with counterculture figures, collaborating with Genesis P-Orridge as a keyboardist for Psychic TV, and credited with composing music for the album Hell Is Invisible...

Leary, along with John Barlow and Terence McKenna characterized the mid-1990s as techno-utopian, and saw the rapid acceleration of culture, emerging media and the unchecked advancement of technology as completely positive.

[29] Rushkoff's own unbridled enthusiasm for cyberculture was tempered by the dotcom boom, when the non-profit character of the Internet was rapidly overtaken by corporations and venture capital.

Rushkoff spent several years exploring Judaism as a primer for media literacy, going so far as to publish a book inviting Jews to restore the religion to its "open source" roots.

[27] Disillusioned by the failure of the open source model to challenge entrenched and institutional hierarchies from religion to finance, he became a colleague of Mark Crispin Miller and Naomi Klein, appearing with them at Smith College[32] as well as in numerous documentaries decrying the corporatization of public space and consciousness.

Rushkoff speculated at the possibility that the programmers interviewed in the film have read something from himself, or other writers such as Nicholas Carr, Sherry Turkle, Andrew Keen, Howard Rheingold, Richard Barbrook, Tim Wu, or even the singer Raffi.

[49] Rushkoff does not limit his writings to the effect of technology on adults, and in Playing the Future turns his attention to the generation of people growing up who understand the language of media like natives, guarded against coercion.

With Coercion (1999), Rushkoff realistically examines the potential benefits and dangers inherent in cyberculture and analyzes market strategies that work to make people act on instinct (and buy!)

One of the most important concepts that he creates and develops is the notion of social currency, or the degree to which certain content and media can facilitate and/or promote relationships and interactions between members of a community.

Beginning with an overview of how money has been gradually centralized throughout time, and pondering the reasons and consequences of such a fact, he goes on to demonstrate how our society has become defined by and controlled by corporate culture.

"[55] In his most recent work, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires (2022), Rushkoff explored the calculus some of the extremely wealthy make in the recognition that their often single-minded pursuit of greater profits and better technology are creating an increasingly unstable world.